Happy Cakes has a sweet cupcake project

Over the past few years, cupcake shops have popped up across town; they're this decade's frozen yogurt shop. In Denver, you can trace the trend back to Happy Cakes Bakeshop in Highland, and that shop -- now in a new location in the courtyard at 3434 West 32nd Avenue -- remains on the cutting edge of cupcakes.

Consider this sweet fundraising project: Every Thursday in April, Happy Cakes is featuring a "Tennyson Center Mystery Flavor" -- created by kids at the nearby Tennyson Center for Children, a center for abused and at-risk youth. The kids submitted two pages of potential cupcake flavors, all based on a spring theme, and "we came up with the recipes that matched the name," explains co-owner Laura Reynolds. (On an earlier project with the Tennyson Center, the kids tried to come up with the recipes, "but it was a little much," she says.)

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So far this month, Happy Cakes has offered up Tickle Me Pink Raspberry and Hopscotch Butterscotch; today's mystery flavor is Tulip Tangerine. On April 22, the mystery flavor will be Grasshopper and on April 29, Blooming Berry Banana

"We were impressed by how thematic they were, and great flavor combinations," Reynolds says.

See for yourself by picking up a mystery cupcake today; they sell for $2.50 each, and all proceeds go to the Tennyson Center.

Patricia Calhoun co-founded Westword in 1977; she’s been the editor ever since. She’s a regular on the weekly CPT12 roundtable Colorado Inside Out, played a real journalist in John Sayles’s Silver City, once interviewed President Bill Clinton while wearing flip-flops, and has been honored with numerous national awards for her columns and feature-writing.